Please welcome aboard the Johnson family.
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She should have left.
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Hello, everybody. And welcome back to the psychology of your 20's.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20's and what they mean for our psychology.
A quick disclaimer before we get into it.
This episode includes topics around body image, eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
Please consider whether you're in the right mental headspace to listen to this today.
Feel free to listen to something else and return when the time is right.
There are resources in the episode description if you need help or further information.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is great to have you here back for another episode.
Well, I feel like the episode title kind of says it all.
We're being vulnerable today, guys.
And I'm kind of super nervous recording this, but you know what?
This show has always been about being honest with the experiences, the thoughts and the feelings of our 20's.
And right now I've been feeling really ugly.
I've been feeling unattractive and it's been really messing with my headspace and my self perception.
So I want to talk about it today because I know it's hard to talk about these things, but I'm guessing there's someone out there who is going to relate and feel less alone.
And that's really what matters to me.
I guess just like some background.
I don't think that I've ever felt particularly beautiful during my life, like even since I was a kid, I was such a tomboy growing up and I always had self cut bangs and was a little bit dirty from playing outside.
And I guess as I grew up and external image and beauty standards really begun to matter, I just never felt that attractive.
And my body has never really looked like what I think I've been taught to see as beautiful.
My shoulders have always been broad.
I've always had big thighs and there are all these other little things that only we tend to notice.
And in my teenage years, I think that deficiency or those imperfections mattered so much to me.
But as I've grown up, I've adopted what I would call a more mature mindset.
I grew into my body, but also my identity and my personality.
And I used confidence as this kind of armor, even when it felt fake.
I firmly believe in the mentality that you need to kind of fake it till you make it and confidence is one of those things that you can definitely fake.
But recently those thoughts have really caught.
It makes me so sad, but at the same time, I keep returning to this idea that what I look like is the only thing that people will find appealing about me.
And I need to fix something about my appearance to feel at peace and to find someone.
And that thought also makes me feel so guilty.
I think in this world where we're experiencing increasingly body positive and accepting and diverse beauty standards, I feel guilty.
Like why do I care about this?
I know I'm so much more than my looks.
I have so many positive qualities that matter so much more that's part of me.
And I always try and adopt this narrative on this podcast that our inner thoughts and ourself are what is most valuable.
So there's this element of feeling hypocritical and frustrated and angry.
And that's hard to admit and really vulnerable, but I wanna be honest and transparent.
Life isn't perfect and I guess neither am I and it's complicated and it's making me feel so conflicted.
So today we're gonna talk about it.
We're going to discuss and explore feeling ugly and the beauty standards that are imposed on us.
What is the psychology behind obsessing over our attractiveness and our appearance and feeling like you don't meet some standard or some convention?
How does that impact our emotional wellbeing and what are the psychological origins from things like low self -esteem and body dysmorphia, social comparison, negative learning experiences and all of these societal influences.
But I also wanna use this time to counter some of the negative beliefs I've been having about myself and maybe some that you're having as well.
I think together we're really going to dive into some of the scientific and psychological ways we can overcome these feelings by challenging negative thoughts, by shifting our focus, practicing self compassion and limiting our exposure to unrealistic beauty standards to kind of arm ourselves with the best
possible mental tools to feel good about our bodies, to feel good about our looks.
You know, today's going to be a vulnerable episode.
I feel like the title gives it away, but I hope we're all prepared.
I hope that it really reaches someone out there who might need to hear it and that people are kind and that you're in the right place to listen to it.
So without further ado, I think we get into it.
Feeling ugly is such a consuming experience and it creates such a narrow view of the world.
Everything becomes about appearances and we tend to become kind of hyper focused on what we think other people notice about us and how that will reflect our character and their acceptance of us sometimes feel like there's constantly this spotlight on us and all of our imperfections and they're so noticeable
and everyone notices the things that we notice and the things that we hate about ourselves.
And this is also very much linked to something called the false consensus effect in psychology, which is our tendency to feel like our personal beliefs are also held by others.
So if we feel unattractive and we appraise ourselves as being ugly, other people must believe that as well.
I think feeling ugly is interesting when we examine it this way because we realize that this feeling would kind of be entirely eliminated if we never had to encounter the presence of others or if we as humans were built not to care about what other people thought of us and about their evaluations.
But that's kind of not the way that the world works.
We've evolved from generations and generations to feel like that spotlight matters, that what we do and what we look like is the most important thing about us because at a time it kind of was.
Beauty was a factor that was correlated to survival, especially if you were a woman, evolutionary psychology and this kind of discipline, it kind of theorizes and proposes that men and women have different adaptive strategies and perspectives on beauty because of this practice of mate selection, right?
So some studies have suggested that women may be more attentive to their physical attractiveness and how that will attract a mate because what they look like, things like if their skin is clear and their hair is shiny and they have that body type, it signals fertility and genetic fitness.
And it used to be purely about survival.
If you were beautiful, I guess, or attractive, it showed that you're a good potential mate, therefore you'd be selected, therefore you would be protected and more likely to survive.
But as those assumptions and innate assessments have developed and as we as a species have matured and become more civilized, those kind of beauty standards that we typically associate with body image issues and feeling unattractive have kind of emerged and as women in particular, but also men, I think
we're told that if we don't conform to certain standards of attractiveness, a man is never going to choose us.
And back when our quality of life was tied to marriage, that really mattered a lot.
There's all this gender socialization that occurs from a young age in which we receive a lot of messages about our appearance and our attractiveness, especially if you're a woman compared to men myself.
And now it's like I'm back to seeking male approval and this has triggered all of these societally ingrained beliefs about my inherent attractiveness and my worth that I've kind of had since a child.
It takes a lot of effort and energy to not care about what we look like, especially in a society that puts it front and center.
So I think that's one factor, putting myself back into an environment in which first impressions and looks feel like they matter, but also weirdly, if you follow me on Instagram, you'll see that I've started to film some of my episodes, which I've never done before.
This podcast has always been such a solitary in my bedroom or my home kind of exercise.
And I think that having to look at myself on video and acknowledge that other people are going to watch that and perhaps judge me has been really anxiety inducing and brought a whole new element to what used to be still is for me a very personal process where my looks have never mattered, only the content
of my brain and what I choose to share verbally.
I think it's important to note here that from a psychological perspective, feeling ugly is a subjective experience.
And when we talk about ugly, that means a different thing for each different person.
It's all very much self -evolved, but also societally ingrained.
And what we choose to pick at ourselves about and what we choose to hate is very much tied to self -perception.
And it's highly subjective, but there's also all of these strong signals from our cultural background and our societal context and society about what we should look like, about what's beautiful and what standards and features make us worthwhile.
And you know, the hardest part about that is that it changes from generation to generation, even from like year to year, and we can kind of never keep up.
And I hate that so much in a way that I can't even begin to kind of form the words to explain because it's just so insidious.
And I find myself in like, this I think is particularly the case when we engage in upward social comparison.
And this occurs whereby we select individuals we see as superior in some domain, such as attractiveness, and we compare ourselves.
And that's not hard to do when we have millions of incredibly beautiful people that we can look at from our phones.
You know, we can go on social media and instantly almost trigger the part of our brain that is going to make us feel bad about our appearance.
It's so prolific, it's so easily acceptable, and we don't even realize it.
And this is what leads to negative self -evaluations, lower self -esteem, and feeling kind of ugly.
When the comparison that we're undertaking reveals some kind of deficit in our appearance, that is what triggers this feeling of ugliness or this feeling of dissatisfaction in our physical appearance.
And there's also kind of links very heavily to self -objectivocation theory.
And this was first presented back in like the 90s, but I've seen such a huge rise in this theory and the popularity of this theory with the normalization and proliferation of social media.
So essentially this theory, self -objectivocation theory, suggests that when we are repeatedly exposed to certain beauty standards through readily accessible stimuli and content, our bodies and our appearance from people online, and we feel like because we are somewhat evaluating and monitoring and liking
and congratulating others on their appearance through these means, that others must be doing that for us.
Hence this spotlight effect comes back into play here.
This self -objectivocation is what can cause us to be more susceptible to social comparison and to negative self -perceptions regarding appearance.
And we haven't even spoken yet about the rise in things like Facetune and editing.
And let me tell you that everyone is doing it, everyone.
Because in a world where we feel like our lives have to be purpose, how we see ourselves, our beliefs about our abilities, our attractiveness even, and the extent to which we accept and respect ourselves and see our position in the world as valuable.
And the origins of our self -esteem can be traced back to various factors that shape our sense of self -worth from very early on in our lives.
Our primary influence is early experiences and interactions, particularly in childhood.
The way we were treated and loved and nurtured, not just by our caregivers, but also by people like our teachers or our peers is going to significantly impact the self -esteem we have as adults.
If you received positive and affirming experiences, if you were treated well, if you weren't bullied, I guess, that's gonna foster a healthy sense of self -worth, especially when your value is reinforced by your parents.
But conversely, negative experiences such as criticism, such as bullying, comments about looks, rejection, even neglect, that can undermine our self -esteem and lead to these feelings of inadequacy being a much larger part of our lives the older we get.
I think over time, our self -esteem becomes ingrained.
It's no longer what other people think or what other people say.
We become our own worst enemy and our own evil voice in our head, telling ourselves that we don't matter, that we're unattractive.
And when we have low self -esteem, that's where a lot of these negative beliefs about our appearance can come from because we focus on our flaws.
We focus on our shortcomings and what that results in is self -criticism, self -doubt, and feeling ugly, feeling unattractive.
I think this is interesting to me because I've always felt like I've had a fairly positive self -esteem until recently, so I'm still trying to figure out what's changed.
And I guess another explanation that we just have to discuss here that we can't ignore are certain psychological disorders that are linked to increased feelings of unattractiveness or an obsession with our appearance.
And I think the one that is most valuable and appropriate to discuss here is body dysmorphic disorder.
Body dysmorphia is another name for it.
And essentially it is a psychological disorder.
It's characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with our perceived flaws.
And it often leads to distress and impairment in our daily functioning because we are so caught up in these small things that we see as imperfect.
So we avoid certain activities, we enter into a negative thought spiral, we feel anxious, and people with body dysmorphic disorder, they often have a distorted perception of their appearance, meaning not objective.
We focus excessively on minor or imagined defects.
And I think it impacts everyone.
I think any mental disorder or condition like this is not just reserved for a certain group of people.
You could be the most beautiful person in the world and still have body dysmorphia because it is entirely subjective and based on your own self -appraisal.
And there are so many key features of this disorder that explain why sometimes we just feel gross and ugly without any explanation or justification.
Some say that this condition is genetic, that it comes from social influences, that it comes from parents, it comes from caregivers, it comes from even OCD, it's super comorbid.
But I think it is a really complex psychological condition that really explains why sometimes nothing can appear wrong from the outside, everything can look perfect, right?
You can be so conventionally attractive, but there is just this obsession with how we look and it shows up in things like needing constant reassurance, never feeling good enough, always believing that people find us unattractive, always being able to identify some flaw, checking mirrors all the time,
trying to conceal ourselves and hide away.
And I just think that it's something that needs to be considered in this broader experience of feeling constantly unattractive and feeling like your appearance and your perception of your appearance is holding you back in your life.
And importantly, I think this information, it's not really a guide and if you feel ugly, the world feels ugly.
And that's really no way to live our lives, kind of stripped of enjoyment and obsessed with whether our chin looks too big in that photo or whether our lives would be better if we lost weight.
I know that on an intimate level and amongst all of my feelings of frustration and anxiety and just general apathy for life at the moment, I also just wanna have agency over how I feel.
I don't like feeling trapped by my thoughts.
So I kinda wanna move on and I really wanna be free of some of these worries and these anxieties and these thoughts.
So how do we kinda counter and overcome feeling ugly?
I think I'm providing these strategies very much for you, but also for myself to kind of remind me that there is freedom from these thoughts and there is freedom from these feelings.
And hopefully we can kind of share and talk through some of the strategies that I've been adopting recently to take time for self reflection and reinforce my inherent belief that looks do not determine my worth.
It can be really hard to believe sometimes, especially when other parts of our minds are kind of self -sabotaging us, but it's not impossible.
So if you're kind of on a self -love journey, like I obviously am at the moment, we're going to talk tangible strategies for shutting down the nasty parts of our brain that try to tell us our appearance is all that matters.
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Here's the thing I keep repeating to myself as kind of a self soothing reminder.
Appearance doesn't matter as much as society often makes it seem.
And no one is looking at you as closely as you are looking and examining yourself.
Ask yourself this question.
How often do you look at someone and pick apart their every floor?
How often do you think about how someone isn't attractive or how they don't look good?
And how often do you think about that for like hours of the day?
Like I would say we never do that.
I never do that at least.
So why do we think that people are doing the same for us?
Why do we think that people are spending so much time in their day worrying or appraising us as unattractive?
Like, and if that even is the case, if there are people out there whose entire purpose in life is just to think about how we don't look good enough for them, does their opinion even really matter?
Do we really wanna be around those people?
Those people aren't doing that.
There are very few people in the world who are choosing to make that decision in their life to feel that way about others.
And I think it's a common but important reminder that your true beauty really lies beyond physical appearance.
And it's rooted in the qualities that make you unique.
Your worth and value as a human being should not be determined solely by how you look.
It is literally the least important thing about you.
Your body is a vessel.
That's what I keep saying.
My body is just a vessel for my character, for my kindness, for my empathy, for my actions.
And those are what truly define me.
My inequalities, my passions, my talents, the way that I treat others.
I always think of this quote from, what's that children's book?
I think it's called The Twits, or I don't know what it's called.
It's like a Roald Dahl book or something.
And there's this quote, though, that really stands out that a person who has good thoughts can never be ugly.
Because if you have good thoughts, they will always kind of shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
And I firmly believe this.
I know there's probably not much of a psychological evidence base for this.
But I really have positive beliefs.
When you find those kind of feelings creeping in like, I wish I was thinner, my pores are so huge, I hate how I look, remind yourself instead and replace those beliefs with your positive qualities, with your achievements and the things you like about yourself beyond physical appearance.
For everything that you can say you hate about the way you look, for everything that you find wrong, for every floor, list something positive about your character.
I think shift your attention away from appearance and place more value on your inequalities.
And part of that is also developing skills and pursuing passions and engaging in activities that cultivate a sense of self -worth that is based on your character and accomplishments rather than something that's super fleeting and unimportant like appearance.
I think you also need to question the evidence for these thoughts.
That's something that I've been really trying to do.
Like this idea that I'm ugly, this like a compulsion that I have at the moment, is that really based on objective facts or is it a subjective perception?
I think often our negative thoughts about appearance are distorted and they're not supported by objective reality.
Has anyone ever said those things to you?
Has anyone ever really picked up on those small features, just something to really think about and something that I need to put in place in my own life as well?
And that's where the second tip comes in, which is to practice self -compassion.
We're not always going to be good at countering our negative thoughts and beliefs.
Sometimes they are still going to be there and they're still going to exist no matter how much positive thinking and attitude work we do.
So treat yourself with kindness and compassion.
Instead of being overly critical, practice self -acceptance.
Treat yourself as you would treat a friend.
Or even better, treat yourself as you would treat the childhood version of you.
If you wouldn't say the things you're saying about your body or your appearance to the child version of you,
